Last year, Apple acheived spot number 15 on CareerBliss’s list of the top fifty happiest companies. This year, Apple came in at a near-bottom 42. What happened?

The list pulls info from anonymous job satisfaction reports that can be submitted to the CareerBliss site, not the most scientifically valid of methods. However, as TUAW notes, the average reported salary for Apple employees dropped from $59,559 per year to $57,269 per year this past year. Maybe that had something to do with it.

This year’s #15? Kaiser Permanente, the managed healthcare company. Heck, even Dell did better on this list, coming in at 34. Nokia did a bit better, grabbing the 32nd spot on the list of companies. The least happy company to work for, on this list, anyway, is Morgan Stanley. The number one “happiest company,” according to the CareerBliss survey, is pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, followed at number two by NASA. What a weird world we live in.